


Rescue Me

by Storyshark2005



Category: Cobra Kai (Web Series), Karate Kid (Movies)
Genre: Bickering, Car Accident, M/M, just a tiny mention of Amoush specifically for libertine past, very background Amanda LaRusso/Anoush Norouzi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-15
Updated: 2019-07-15
Packaged: 2020-06-28 15:43:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19815382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Storyshark2005/pseuds/Storyshark2005
Summary: Johnny will think heavy thoughts from a plastic hospital room chair, that both of them were playing familiar roles. Daniel was throwing himself into harm’s way, putting himself between danger and the ones he loved. And Johnny knows that even though he’s gone from being the harm to being the one protected- that either way, Daniel’s the one taking the punch.Some things never change.(or, A car crash clarifies priorities for Daniel and Johnny. Season 2/post S2-ish)





	Rescue Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brihana25](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brihana25/gifts).



> My dubious answer to brihana25's prompt for a fiery rescue. Brihana, this doesn't involve batting at an oxygen mask, and less whumpy than you were hoping I'm sure, this sort of had a mind of it's own, and I wrote it over 2 or 3 hours, so it's probably not as polished as I'd like. 
> 
> Hopefully you enjoy!

***

“We talked about it.”

“What’d you tell her?” Johnny can taste salt and feel, and hear, Daniel sigh from under the soft skin of his neck, just above the jut of his collar bone. 

“I told her I wasn’t happy.” Daniel’s chest is hot, pushing impatiently upwards, fingertips pressed into Johnny’s ribs. 

Johnny pulls away, staring down at his lips, his dark eyes. The bedroom is bare, just a mattress on a frame with plain navy sheets and cheap, white plastic blinds, some of them snapped and cracked, letting the security lights from the parking lot draw orange lines across the gray carpet. 

“You didn’t tell her.” 

“I...” Daniel’s mouth hangs open. 

Johnny bites down on the inside of his cheek. “It’s fine,” he says, reaching for the bedside table, and their chests press together, bringing their hearts in line. 

Daniel pulls Johnny’s head down, fingers around his jaw, pressing their foreheads together. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, and Johnny knows he means it, even though he wishes he would stop saying that kind of shit, like he needed the pity. 

“I’ll figure it out. It’s...” his voice hitches, Johnny mouthing down his torso, and Daniel grips his hair, holding him down where Johnny’s chin pushes into his belly, right below his ribs. 

“I want you,” he says. “I’m just...seeing if there’s a way I don’t lose everything else.”

Johnny doesn’t say anything. He nods into Daniel’s hip. 

Daniel doesn’t know it, not yet, he’s always been a damned optimist. But sometimes life is a zero-sum game. Sometimes the only way to bring balance is to cut the rope holding the weight at the end. 

Sometimes, you have to lose a life to save another. 

***

They’re in the Challenger, heading east on the Boulevard, late at night or early in the morning, Johnny’s head is pounding from lack of sleep and he let Daniel drive for some goddamn reason, a reason he doesn’t remember now, and won’t remember later, in the hospital room that will smell like cleaning supplies and sick and burnt hair. 

The girl, her name is Chloe, he finds out later. She was eighteen and soaked to the gills in cocaine and vodka. She plows her green jeep into the driver’s-side fender, crumpling the front-end like an accordion and flipping the car like a coin, _heads or tails._ The jeep ricochets into the corner of an auto parts store (go figure) and Chloe goes through the windshield and bashes her head into the concrete wall. She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, so that was that.

Johnny won’t give a shit about that, later, not with Daniel laid out like a piece of meat on a hospital bed with an oxygen mask over his nose, oil streaked over his face, legs and torso wrapped in gauze, he’ll look like the goddamn zombie apocalypse and it will feel like the end of the world.

Johnny doesn’t even see it coming, his head hurts and he’s pissed off and they’re arguing over whether Daniel should stay in the dealership, whether it would be worth the money, all the stress and the weirdness with Amanda. Daniel thinks he should keep it, of course, even though it makes him miserable these days and with Sam and Robby off to college he’s barely spending any time at the dojo, even though he was born to teach karate, with his warmth and his patience and gentle humor. 

Johnny’s pissed because like everything else, he knows Daniel is a better teacher than he is. If he’d stop bitching about how it was _better this way, anyhow_ and how he should _leave teaching to better men_ and Johnny knows he’s really just talking about Miyagi. The great, mythical Miyagi.

“Forget about the old man,” Johnny’d snapped, harshly. “Jesus Christ, just be your own man. Stop comparing yourself to your sensei. Do your own thing.” 

“Don’t talk about him.” 

Johnny shook his head. “Whatever, man. I’m just saying, you need to figure out what you want instead of doing what you think everyone else wants out of you-” 

“What, like you don’t have an opinion on what I should be doing?” 

“I _want_ you at the dojo, teaching. With me. Because whenever you’re there you’re like a goddamn labrador, and whenever you come home from the dealership you look like you went eight rounds with a dump truck-” 

“I have two kids to put through college-” 

“They have _college funds_ \- and those kids could stand to get a goddamn job-” 

“Don’t,” Daniel laughs humorlessly, “tell me how to raise my kids-” 

“I’m trying to _help_ you-” 

“Well, you’re not. You know, sometimes in life, John, you have to do things you don’t want to do-” 

Johnny pressed his hands into his eyes. It’s why he missed the oncoming headlights, the glare before the impact.

“You know, why don’t you remind me one more time, LaRusso, you seem to really love that-” 

The girl doesn’t even hit the brakes. Daniel does, though. He yells out, Johnny looks up, and the car jerks violently around, and Johnny smells rubber and tastes blood in his mouth. 

_There he goes again_ , Johnny thinks, wildly, _putting himself in harm's way_. 

Johnny will think heavy thoughts from a plastic hospital room chair, that both of them were playing familiar roles. Daniel was throwing himself into harm’s way, putting himself between danger and the ones he loved. And Johnny knows that even though he’s gone from being the harm to being the one protected- that either way, Daniel’s the one taking the punch. 

Some things never change. 

***

Things happen very quickly, and Johnny will have nightmares about this until he dies. 

He stays conscious the whole time, with only a few fuzzy spots. 

The car is upside down, and they’re both hanging from their seatbelts. Daniel’s eyes are closed, and there is a lot of blood. 

Fire. The car is on fire. The heat is unbearable, and Johnny knows he has to get them out. Black, acrid smoke pools into the cab, his eyes and his lungs and his skin burn. 

He can’t hear anything, he knows he’s trying to yell, wake Daniel up and fumble his seatbelt open, the metal buckle is searing, and finally Johnny crumples down (or up, everything is upside down) and there’s barely space to reach up but Daniel’s belt won’t unbuckle, and Johnny’s fingers aren’t working right anyway, and he’s not moving, and there’s blood trickling down his forehead like chocolate syrup, it doesn’t even look real in this orange and black light.

He doesn’t remember much, but he knows he was halfway out the passenger window, which was shattered, somehow he had his arms locked under Daniel’s arms, and Daniel’s limp head is on his shoulder, but Daniel is stuck, his foot, or his leg or something, down near where the door was crumpled in. 

Johnny’s desperate and he’s pulling hard, but it won’t give and he’s screaming without hearing anything and coughing so hard his lungs are on fire, and he thinks- _this is a shit way to go._

They tell him later, Daniel’s leg wasn’t pinned, his belt had caught on the shift stick, the one that used to be a cobra’s head, the one that Johnny had replaced after Kreese took back Cobra Kai and Johnny’d had to tear everything off the car that he’d spent all that money on, all that money trying to paint over Daniel's presence in his life. 

He was always doing that, taking two steps forward and one step back. Then another. Then another. 

The firefighters rip a door off and pull Johnny off of Daniel, and they pull Daniel out of the car, spread them out on the asphalt in front of the ambulance. They’re strapping Daniel down onto on a gurney and Johnny’s sitting upright a few feet away, trying to stand back up while a medic tries to put a mask over his mouth. 

Johnny thinks back to what Daniel had said, months ago, about treading carefully through the divorce so as not to lose everything. Johnny looks down at the guy shoving a plastic tube down Daniel’s throat, quick and efficient and violent. 

He’s close now, horrifically close, to losing it all. Daniel, and with Daniel would go Robby, and this new life, the one he hadn’t dared to really think he’d ever get. 

_You’re a loser_ suddenly had an awful new meaning.

He sees Daniel’s eyes flutter open, and Johnny tries to yell and tries to push forward, but the medic yells, and another ambulance arrives, and they push a needle into his arm and he feels like a limp noodle, and they strap him down too, and they take Daniel away, shut him up and take him away.

***

Kissing Ali Mills at 16 is maybe the happiest memory Johnny has. He misses that feeling, being at the top of the world with a broad horizon in front of him.

Kissing Daniel LaRusso at 52 isn’t quite as happy, per say, but it’s one where Johnny feels whole again, since the first time he realized that most kids had a mommy and a daddy, not just a mommy _or_ a daddy, which meant something was deeply wrong with him, something about him that made his father want to leave and never come back. Kissing Daniel doesn’t make him forget these things, but for a few moments he could feel like none of that shit actually mattered all that much, like coming home and dropping all your heavy bags inside the door, like _I’ll clean those up later,_ and he knows that as much shit as LaRusso gives him, one thing is true- Daniel LaRusso is a mouthy, jumped-up, sanctimonious punk but he is who he is and he sees straight through all Johnny’s shit, and he wouldn’t be kissing Johnny if he didn’t really, _really_ want to.

It’s all very simple between them, when it comes down to it.

Johnny has a bunch of cracks in him that Daniel fills up with his laugh and his stupid hair and his New Jersey accent and his incredible cooking and the dumbest jokes Johnny’s ever heard and his childish soul and he makes Robby happy and he just...

He just fits. Johnny thought he was too fucked up for anybody to fit like that. It doesn’t make any sense. 

But really Daniel was the type of guy that could probably fit with anybody, he was that good and talented and generous and- well maybe he was fucked in the head to throw away a marriage for Johnny. 

The day the paperwork clears, and all the conversations are done, Daniel comes be-bopping into the apartment with a bag of groceries that he throws on the counter. 

“The kids are still talking to me,” he had said, kissing Johnny. “Amanda made a joke today. She was in a good mood. I think she’s sleeping with Anoush.” 

“What is it with her picking up guys way below her league,” Johnny teases, shoving him back into the door, pushing his shirt off his shoulders. 

“Oh, c’mon,” Daniel does that thing with his tongue, and Johnny has to brace a hand on the wall. “I was the number one draft pick in my day.” 

“What does that even mean?” Johnny groans, and manhandles him back to the bedroom. 

“It means we’re in the playoffs, baby-” 

Johnny holds him down into the sheets, with a hand planted firmly on his chest, skin hot and slick. “Cool it with the sports metaphors. You’re bad at it.” 

Daniel’s pupils blow black, “What, you can do better?”

Johnny pulls his shirt off, and lowers slowly down, till he’s almost nose to nose with him, lips brushing. 

“I call the shots around here, LaRusso. You’re mine, now.” 

Daniel shivers, and nods.

***

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Daniel says, and then ruins it by coughing. 

“You’re a fucking idiot.” Johnny tells him, sitting in the plastic chair he’s pulled up close. 

“Look at you, you’ve got-” Daniel gestures weakly, with the one arm that was mobile. He had broken his collar bone, so the other one was wrapped up and held close to his chest. His voice was still dry and gravely from the smoke inhalation.

“ - burnt hands.” he finishes. 

Johnny looks down at his gauzy hands. He looks up, at Daniel’s wrapped up ribs, his bruised face, the gash above an eyebrow, stitched shut. His knee had also been re-injured, dislocated. The same one Johnny had driven his elbow into at the Tournament. 

There’s a heavy silence, and Johnny feels his throat close up, and he wouldn’t cry except Daniel reaches his good arm out and threads it through his hair, like he knows Johnny loves (he hadn’t told him, his mother used to do that, let Johnny rest his head in her lap while she’d comb her fingers through his hair, the comforting touch of unconditional love). 

Johnny drops his head into his hands. 

“It’s fine,” Daniel says roughly. “I’m okay.” 

Johnny doesn’t have much to say. He tips his forehead down onto Daniel thigh, warm under the scratchy sheet, and Daniel keeps a hand in his hair. 

“So....” Daniel starts. “How’s the car?” 

Johnny laughs so he won’t cry, and Daniel laughs with him. 

“I can’t believe the money you spent on that paint job, anyway.” 

***

They get Daniel home a couple weeks later, he can walk but he has to keep the knee brace on, and his arm is still in a sling. Sam and Robby hang out at the apartment on and off, fussing over him and they all watch the whole Godfather trilogy and Sam falls asleep halfway through part one, which- Johnny can relate. He’s more of a Scarface kind of guy, anyway. 

Sam’s head has tipped onto Daniel’s good shoulder and Robby’s also passed out the other side of Daniel, and Johnny comes over to clear the coffee table. He reaches down, presses his hand to Daniel’s forehead, up under his hair. 

“You want me to wake ‘em up?” He looks to Sam, cheek pressed into Daniel’s soft hoody. 

“Nah,” Daniel whispers. 

Johnny turns to clear the coffee table of plates and glasses. 

“I talked to Amanda. I’m getting out of the dealership.” 

Johnny nearly drops the plates. 

“ _What?!”_ He manages to hiss, lowly. 

“I...” And Daniel looks at him, straight in the eyes, those big brown eyes that hadn’t changed in decades. “I was thinking in the hospital, that you were right. Life’s too short. I don’t want to sell cars anymore. I want to teach karate with you. We can figure the rest out.” 

Johnny stays still, stooped over with the plates in his hands. 

“You’re sure?” 

“Yeah,” Daniel says, “It’ll be fun.” And he smiles with his whole face, the cheeks and the mouth and the eyes, all of it, and he was beautiful.

Johnny doesn’t feel like a loser. He feels like the opposite of that, in his shitty little living room with Daniel, with Daniel and his daughter, with Robby who doesn’t hate him, and the TV turned on mute, so that he could hear the sound of both teenagers breathing softly. 

“Good,” he says. 

He knows what he wants to do, and he has the gift of Time to do it. Time for Daniel to heal, for them both to teach karate, to see the kids off to college, and time to love who he loves. 

***


End file.
